Michael J Fox's Ad

I'm sure you've heard of the ad by now and Limpbomb's saying Fox either was off his meds or "acting". Here's what you may not know about Parkinson's:

Fortunately, I have access to this thing called the Internet and this nifty search engine called Google. A few clicks led me to William J. Weiner M.D., professor and chairman of the department of neurology at the University of Maryland Medical Center. He's also director of the Parkinson's clinic there.

Even better, it turns out Dr. Weiner has a phone. When I reached him, he said he'd seen the ad earlier in the day and was fairly surprised to hear about Limbaugh's reaction. Here's why:

What you are seeing on the video is side effects of the medication. He has to take that medication to sit there and talk to you like that. ... He's not over-dramatizing. ... [Limbaugh] is revealing his ignorance of Parkinson's disease, because people with Parkinson's don't look like that at all when they're not taking their medication. They look stiff, and frozen, and don't move at all. ... People with Parkinson's, when they've had the disease for awhile, are in this bind, where if they don't take any medication, they can be stiff and hardly able to talk. And if they do take their medication, so they can talk, they get all of this movement, like what you see in the ad.

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